The University of Melbourne has called for feedback in response to the University Rule “Use of University premises and facilities: conditions regarding protests” as well as to its Surveillance Policy. This is Jeff’s response.

For all of those who doubt the effectiveness of activism and direct action, this victory of the students of La Trobe was the result of a General Student Meeting followed by an occupation of the Chancellery.

That was the late Emma Johnston in 1995, when, as President of the Student Union, she led the fight against upfront student fees. In 2025, as Vice Chancellor, she implemented new measures to restrict precisely the direct action she had once lauded. The university banned any kind of “demonstration, rally, sit-in, occupation and other like forms of public assembly” inside university buildings and began uisng campus Wi-Fi to surveil staff and students suspected of protesting.

Today, the university seeks feedback on regulations related to both choices. My response addresses the policies together: for the sake of simplicity but also because of the obvious relationship between the two.

Johnston’s rhetoric as a young idealist highlights an obvious point about the measures: namely, their implementation did not result from any escalation in student activism. Johnston’s generation of protesters employed precisely the tactics she later banned, as had the students before her. Consider the exhibition of campus dissent compiled by the university archives in 2013. Almost every campaign the catalogue celebrates would have conflicted with Johnston’s rules, often spectacularly so.

In 1971, anti-war activists sheltered four conscientious resisters of the draft in the student union building, which they transformed into a pirate radio station. To shut down “Radio Resistance”, 150 police officers smashed their way into the barricaded building, causing huge amounts of property damage. Two of the draft resisters remained hidden. Two others made their escape.

Throughout the 1970s, Boomers staged demonstrations far, far more militant than those of 2024 and 2025, and yet, back then, students didn’t require edicts outlawing indoor protests so as to feel “safe”.

To understand the administration’s actions, we need to reprise briefly the context for its choices.

In 2022, the Student Union voted to endorse the call by Palestinian civil society for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In effect, BDS in higher education simply meant holding Israel to the standard applied to other countries. The university maintains a register of nations subject to government-mandated sanctions, including the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Zimbabwe. The relevant webpage describes sanctions as “an alternative to armed force to address situations of international concern, for example in response to an abuse of human rights or the proliferation of weapons’” This is not controversial: most academics accept the necessity of isolating human rights abusers. Few seek collaborations with nations or institutions complicit with violence and repression.

The Student Union explained its decision on the same basis, noting:

UMSU and its predecessor organisations has maintained a 130-year tradition of students standing up for human rights issues, including those relating to international affairs. This is consistent with the purpose, mission and values of UMSU. UMSU continues to encourage respectful debate of international affairs on campus and deplores and denounces bigotry and hate speech in all its forms.

UMSU’s eminently reasonable resolution attracted ferocious attacks from conservatives, and was eventually rescinded after law student (and Liberal Party member) Justin Riazaty threatened legal measures. But the attendant publicity seems to have motivated the university to adopt the International Holocaust Association’s controversial “working definition” of antisemitism.

That was in January 2023. In October that year, after Hamas’s brutal “Al-Aqsa Flood” attacks, Israel launched its assault on Gaza, which quickly developed into a defining atrocity of the twenty-first century.

The official toll from the war stands at least 70,000, though the Lancet estimates a figure of excess mortality perhaps 40 per cent higher. Notably, Israel killed at least 20,000 children: in 2024, statisticians listed the IDF as one of the major causes of child mortality globally. Gaza today contains more child amputees than anywhere in the world, with 3,000 to 4,000 children missing one or both limbs. Yet its medical facilities have been systematically destroyed from nearly 800 documented attacks on hospitals, clinics and ambulances. “Whoever stays until the end will tell the story”, wrote Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila on a whiteboard at al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia refugee camp in October 2023. “We did what we could — remembers us”. He was killed shortly afterwards: one of the over 1700 healthcare workers to die in the war, with approximately two to three medical professionals slain by Israeli forces each day of the conflict.

The Israeli blockade led to widespread famine, with 460 people (including 154 children) dead from starvation, and many more shot as they sought food. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 92 per cent of all residential buildings and 88 per cent of commercial facilities in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

In the face of such horrors, students protested. Of course they did. How could anyone expect they wouldn’t?

After all, in 2026, one struggles to find any credible organisations or scholars with relevant expertise who deny the genocidal nature of the Israeli campaign. “Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide?” said Raz Segal, an Israeli researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey, discussing the growing academic consensus with the Dutch newspaper, NRC. “No”. In September 2025, the International Association of Genocide scholars voted overwhelmingly (with 85 per cent of respondents in favour) that Israel’s actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide. The judgement among academic experts coincides with that of almost every major human rights organisation and NGO, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Middle East Studies Association, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and many, many more. The International Court of Justice will take years to rule on Gaza (the genocide case pertaining to the 2018 atrocities against the Rohingya people in Myanmar remains unresolved). Nevertheless, it has, remarkably, already declared allegations of genocide against Israel as “plausible”.

As for the University of Melbourne, it presented its official position on Gaza on a still-live page entitled “Conflict in the Middle East and activism on campus”. The document reads:

The University of Melbourne is a diverse, multi-cultural and multi-faith community made up of more than 80,000 students and staff combined, where a wide range of views exist. All perspectives are welcome, but these must be expressed in a respectful way, so that all students and staff can fully participate in university life.

Extraordinarily — shamefully — the university statement does not mention the word “genocide”. It does not rebut allegations about such a crime, nor does it challenge the academic consensus. It simply ignores the whole issue, refusing to even acknowledge the extensive and credible evidence that what it calls the “conflict in the Middle East” involves the crime of all crimes.

In the abstract, “respectful expression” is a desirable goal. But what does it mean for the university to declare, in relation to a genocide, that “all perspectives are welcome”? Consider a similar document published in 1994: would the university have publicly encouraged “a wide range of views” in relation to the Rwandan genocide, as if the attempted extermination of an entire people constituted an individual preference like a taste for coffee over tea?

The Middle East conflict page adds:

The University deplores and actively stands against all forms of racism, including Antisemitism and Islamophobia as outlined in our Anti-racism commitment. We also condemn all acts of violence and terrorism.

As the  archives’ exhibition of campus dissent shows, contemporary-style activism at the University of Melbourne emerged in the early 1960s, through the opposition of students and staff to the so-called “colour bar” associated with the White Australia policy. Melbourne students joined the campaign against South African apartheid. Some participated in the famous “Freedom Rides” against racial segregation. That history of activism shaped campus culture and facilitated the “anti-racism commitment”, with its pledge:

we actively position ourselves as an anti-racist institution … it is our moral duty to pursue this aspiration.

With their solidarity with Palestine, the students understood themselves as taking that “moral duty” seriously.

In his book The Message, the acclaimed American essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates describes visiting the West Bank.

The roads and highways we traveled were marked off for license plates of different colors—yellow, used mostly by those who are Jewish, and white with green lettering, used almost entirely by those who are not. As we drove these roads along the West Bank, our guide pointed out settlements—a word that I had always taken to refer to rugged camps staked out in the desert but in fact the settlements are more akin to American subdivisions, distinguished from the villages of the Palestinians by homes with large red roofs, as surely as a white picket fence denoted the suburbs of twentieth-century America and not its teeming cities.

Coates discovers that the Israeli authorities rarely grant permits to access water from aquifers to Palestinians and notes:

[I]n those West Bank settlements which I once took as mere outposts, you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools. On seeing those cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself. And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet — under American patronage — that resembled the world that my parents were born into.

Coates’ narrative account of Israeli segregation followed a series of intensively-researched reports by three of the most reputed human rights groups active in the region. In 2021, the Israeli NGO B’Tselem published a report explaining “all Palestinians living under Israeli rule are treated as inferior in rights and status”. B’Tselem headlined its document “This is apartheid”.

That year, Human Rights Watch wrote that

the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the [Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)]. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.

In 2022, Amnesty International went further, declaring that

almost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasi-governmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians across Israel and the OPT and against Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside the territory.

That was the backdrop to the student union’s 2022 commitment to BDS, an attempt to end what Coates would later call “the separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule” through the non-violent tactics popularised during the South African freedom struggle.

When, in response, the university endorsed the IHRA “working definition” of anti-semitism, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network warned that the document had become “increasingly weaponised against pro-Palestinian initiatives and to silence Palestinian voices”. In that, APAN concurred with Kenneth Stern, the man who had drafted the IHRA “working definition”. Stern said that he’d never intended to provide a campus speech code — and added that the IHRA document gave university administrators “a strong motivation to suppress, or at least condemn, political speech”. Elsewhere, he explained: “what we’re talking about with IHRA is quashing and chilling political speech through law”.

So it has proven at the University of Melbourne.

The IHRA document contains eleven “contemporary examples of antisemitism” — and no fewer than seven reference the Israeli state. Obviously, a university should guard against antisemitism. Obviously, it should protect Jewish students from bigots. But by endorsing the IHRA definition — and by doing so more-or-less directly in opposition to UMSU’s BDS motion — the administration hopelessly muddled the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and so fatally compromised the fight against all forms of racism.

The IHRA offers as one example of antisemitism:

applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

The passage implies that people criticising human rights violations in Israel should be labelled antisemitic so long as worse abuses can be identified elsewhere. In the context of the Gaza war, the example facilitated a relativisation of genocide, a moral absolute.

A second example reads:

denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination; e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

As Human Rights Watch notes, the wording

opens the door to labeling as antisemitic criticisms that Israeli government policies and practices violate the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the findings of major Israeli, Palestinian and global human rights organizations that Israeli authorities are committing the crime against humanity of apartheid against Palestinians.

Such was the regulatory framework the university established for itself prior to the protests of 2024 and 2025. No wonder it all went terribly wrong.

The campus campaign for Palestine was notably diverse, bringing together students from every faith and ethnic identity. The IHRA says (quite correctly) that it is antisemitic to “hold […] Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel”. The students assiduously avoided that. Their rallies featured Jewish speakers on almost every platform. Their spokespeople repeatedly denounced racism of all kinds.

But, of course, that itself became a mark against them.

The university had committed to the IHRA statement, which described opposition to Israeli apartheid as antisemitic by definition. By that logic, the more vociferously activists condemned racism — the more they called for equality and democracy — the more racist they became.

In its 2021 report, B’Tselem described gradations of rights allowed to Palestinians, depending on where exactly they lived, before concluding that

the distinction obfuscates the fact that the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians.

Quite obviously, that was what protesters meant when they chanted “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free”: they were demanding equal treatment for all. In any other context, an insistence on equality regardless of ethnicity would be an uncontroversial democratic demand. In the context of student support for Palestine, it was taken — by right-wing groups, by the conservative media and by the university — as an exterminationist slogan, and condemned more vociferously than the genocide unfolding in Gaza.

You can see the consequences in the university’s “Conflict in the Middle East and activism on campus” page. Today, it features twelve posts under the heading “updates and advice” and ten under the heading “communications and notices”. None mention genocide. None mention apartheid. All of them, in some way or another, centre on rebuking, threatening or restricting the activists opposing genocide and apartheid.

That was the context for the regulations on which the university now seeks feedback: a conviction, fanned by conservative publications and organisations, that the encampment on the South Lawns and the occupation in the Arts West building harboured murderous antisemites whose suppression necessitated measures of unprecedented severity, warranting actions so draconian as to draw condemnation by the Human Rights Law Centre, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Another educational institution might have welcomed — even encouraged — students and staff registering opposition to egregious injustice. It might have treated the solidarity encampment on the South Lawns as an opportunity rather than a problem, a potential focus for community engagement akin to the iconic Aboriginal Tent Embassy (which remains near Parliament House more than half a century after its establishment). It might, perhaps, have devoted its own resources to responding to the moral challenge posed by Gaza, staging forums, debates, conferences and other discussions. It might have cut its ties with educational institutions complicit with the genocide and instead sought to provide places for Palestinian students and academics. It might have added Israel to its list of sanctioned regimes.

But that was not what the University of Melbourne did. Instead, it dispersed the protests, introducing rules that banned a single student or staff member peacefully holding a placard inside a lecture hall. It issued no official condemnations of the genocide. It presented no lectures or conferences about Israeli apartheid. When urged to curtail research collaborations with universities complicit in the genocide, it declared instead,

[w]e fully support our researchers and students engaging in their international research. It is their choice and fundamental to their academic freedom.

This last point warrants further discussion.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory says that

Israel used airstrikes, shelling, burning and controlled demolitions to damage and destroy more than 90 per cent of the school and university buildings in Gaza, creating conditions where education for children, including adolescents, and the livelihood of teachers have been made impossible.

Close to 200 academics and professors have been killed, along with 800 teachers and educational staff.

Why, we might wonder, does academic freedom mandate collaboration with the regime responsible for many have described as “scholasticide” and not, say, with the Central African Republic? To this, the university replies:

Research at the University of Melbourne is subject to Australian law. This includes the Export Controls Act and the Defence and Strategic Goods List. It complies with the Defence Industry Security Program (DISP) in defence related research. It is compliant with and approved under the relevant research ethics and integrity codes and is reviewed by the University of Melbourne Research Due Diligence Advisory Group.

It is true that the Australian government does not require sanctions against Israel. On the contrary, it regards Israel as a valuable ally, continuing to work with its weapons industry, and inviting for a state visit President Isaac Herzog, a man accused of genocidal incitement.

But the university cannot outsource its moral obligations to the state. If anything, the government’s complicity with the Gaza atrocities makes an independent stand by the university more necessary rather than less.

That responsibility emerges very plainly from the university’s “anti-racism statement”, which notes:

The University’s founding was enabled by the racism that ‘justified’ the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their lands and many of the activities of the University contributed to the erasure of Aboriginal knowledge systems and values that have shaped human society on this continent for at least 60,000 years. Much of our built form, landscaping and some building names at the University continue to reinforce this erasure. The University’s ‘Truth-telling and Place’ project documents this institutional and colonial past and the University’s then complicity with respect to scientific racism and eugenics.

Even though Indigenous dispossession was driven by the colonial state, the university, quite correctly, recognises its own responsibility for what took place. As a result, it commissioned the two volumes of Dhoombak Goobgoowana: a serious, praiseworthy attempt to begin reparations for the university’s historic racism.

In the preface to Volume One, the former Vice Chancellor Duncan Maskell says, quite correctly:

It is the kind of work that a leading contemporary research university is obliged to undertake. By supporting it, we seek to make a positive difference for the future.

As Maskell implies, because we cannot change yesterday, a meaningful historical re-examination must have implications for today and tomorrow. As Indigenous activists say, sorry means you don’t do it again.  In their introduction, editors Ross L Jones, James Waghorne and Marcia Langton explain:

Exposing these histories should prompt academics today to reflect on their own practices, and how they might enable the kinds of intolerance that this project has uncovered. The chapters that follow ask why individuals acted in the ways that they did, how academic practices informed their actions, and how ideas that have since been discredited can re-emerge at times.

To put their point another way, we might ponder what would have been required for academics and administrators to break from the pernicious ideas and practices to which the university was committed in, say, the first years of the twentieth century, a time when politicians, newspapers and respectable society as a whole fervently championed White Australia.

If, back then, the University of Melbourne had denounced racism, rid itself of its eugenicists and social Darwinists, and opened itself to Indigenous and non-white students, it would have placed itself at odds with the government on which it relied financially. It would have been attacked mercilessly by the press — and, for that matter, by the many staff, students and alumni for whom whiteness was central to personal identity.

In short, a university that opposed racism in 1900 would have rapidly found itself isolated, divided and impoverished — much like a university that opposed genocide in 2024.

Since the Gaza war began, politicians, conservative newspapers, and right-wing lobby groups have relentlessly attacked any support for Palestine. Had the university supported its students, it would have faced a concerted campaign, including from the government.

Nevertheless, as the editors of the Dhoombak Goobgoowana project stress, principles matter most when they’re unpopular, not when they’re convenient. How can an institution that takes no position on genocide and apartheid claim to have learned anything from the colonial past?

Because the university leadership refused even to acknowledge the genocide, the moral burden of confronting injustice fell overwhelmingly on those with the least power and privilege. The students — with support primarily from casual and junior staff — rallied again and again and again. The institution as a whole did nothing. Rather, the administration implemented its anti-protest laws and its electronic surveillance to increase the pressure on protesters, in an effort to make the whole uncomfortable business go away.

The current consultation provides an opportunity to rescind regulations that never should have been passed. A university is neither a barracks nor a jail. It should not maintain a “surveillance register” (even writing those words feels astonishing). It should make all reasonable efforts to encourage rather than dissuade students, staff and the community to engage in public life, including through political protests. 

But abolishing these repugnant measures is not enough.

Last year, the scholar and journalist Moustafa Bayoumi warned that the world was breaking, a collapse beginning

with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel. The implications of this collapse are profound for international, regional and even domestic politics. Political dissent is repressed, political language is policed, and traditionally liberal societies are increasingly militarized against their own citizens.

The regulations at Melbourne University represent a minor manifestation of this phenomenon. The underlying issue matters far more. When the supposed guardians of liberal values remained silent — or, worse, sided with perpetrators against victims — during the most publicly-documented genocide in human history, they normalised the unthinkable, and we’re now facing the consequences they unleashed: wars of aggression, the gleeful abuse of human rights, state-sanctioned assassinations and so on.

What has been done cannot be undone, but a reversal of the current descent into barbarism begins with justice for Gaza. The university still has an opportunity to speak out against genocide and apartheid. It should do so.

Image: University of Melbourne, Mahmoud’s Hall (Matt Hrkac, Wikimedia Commons)